scholarly journals From Paine to PlayStation

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 44-57
Author(s):  
Andrey Mintchev
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Edmund Burke ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Alexis De Tocqueville ◽  
Thomas Paine ◽  
Invaluable Tool ◽  
History Of ◽  
Cinematic Experience ◽  
Historical Accounts ◽  
The French Revolution

In Assassin’s Creed Unity, the historical narratives of Thomas Paine, Edmund Burke, Alexis de Tocqueville, François Furet, and Peter McPhee are presented in a way that capitalizes on the virtual and tangible characteristics of gaming. By isolating the historical accounts of the French Revolution, Ubisoft Entertainment has created a stimulating and cinematic experience that challenges the unwavering pedagogy of French historiography. Due to the nature of videogames, Assassin’s Creed Unity serves as a gateway to understanding the French Revolution through the immersive qualities of simulation. The game safely navigates around the historicity of the event by recreating the vibrant landscapes of Paris and filling its streets with believable characters, models, player-driven decisions, and a historically-rich narrative. To this effect, Assassin’s Creed Unity inevitably collides with the opinions of several historians in a way that passively educates its audience on the overall history of 1790's France—making the game an invaluable tool for learning about the French Revolution. 

The French Revolution Controversy

2019 ◽  
pp. 95-120
Author(s):  
Susan Marks
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Mary Wollstonecraft ◽  
Political Community ◽  
Edmund Burke ◽  
The Political ◽  
Thomas Paine ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

The rights of man ‘arrived’ in England, in the sense of beginning to circulate in public discourse and becoming a topic on which people staked out positions, during the final decade of the eighteenth century. The context was debate over the significance of the French Revolution for England (the ‘Revolution controversy’). This chapter initiates discussion of the contested meaning of the rights of man in that debate, examining contributions by Richard Price, Edmund Burke, Mary Wollstonecraft and Thomas Paine. A vision of the rights of man emerges as the rights of the living to control the political community of which those latter are a part.

scholarly journals What is conservatism? History, ideology and party

2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 449-475 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Bourke
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Edmund Burke ◽  
Karl Mannheim ◽  
Conservative Ideology ◽  
History Of ◽  
The French Revolution

Is there a political philosophy of conservatism? A history of the phenomenon written along sceptical lines casts doubt on the existence of a transhistorical doctrine, or even an enduring conservative outlook. The main typologies of conservatism uniformly trace its origins to opposition to the French Revolution. Accordingly, Edmund Burke is standardly singled out as the ‘father’ of this style of politics. Yet Burke was de facto an opposition Whig who devoted his career to assorted programmes of reform. In restoring Burke to his original milieu, the argument presented here takes issue with 20th-century accounts of conservative ideology developed by such figures as Karl Mannheim, Klaus Epstein and Samuel Huntington. It argues that the idea of a conservative tradition is best seen as a belated construction, and that the notion of a univocal philosophy of conservatism is basically misconceived.

Brahmins and carnivores: the Irish historian in Great Britain

1987 ◽  
Vol 25 (99) ◽  
pp. 225-235 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. G. Boyce
Keyword(s):  
Great Britain ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Edmund Burke ◽  
Thomas Paine ◽  
Irish Studies ◽  
Irish History ◽  
Irish Immigrants ◽  
Hereditary Factors ◽  
The French Revolution

This paper is concerned with the teaching of Irish history in Great Britain, with the students, the teachers and their subject. Each merits a brief mention before any detailed discussion, in order to draw attention to the problems that exist, and to clear up any misunderstanding or ignorance about the task that is to be performed.In the great controversy between Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine occasioned by the French Revolution, Paine made at least one telling remark in his refutation of Burke’s defence of tradition and usage: he declared that an hereditary monarch was about as sensible as an hereditary mathematician. An hereditary Irish studies student in Great Britain makes about as much sense as both. Much nonsense is talked about the inherited genes of the Irish in Britain, on the assumption that (somehow) an interest in, and ability to comprehend, Irish studies can be transmitted from one generation of Irish immigrants to another. This may be the case; but if it is, it probably takes its rise from social rather than hereditary factors; and it is no more likely to produce an intelligent, perceptive student of Ireland than of France.

Rights After the Revolutions

2019 ◽  
pp. 338-365 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Whatmore
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Civil Liberty ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
Thomas Paine ◽  
Model State ◽  
Short Period ◽  
History Of ◽  
The French Revolution

The period of the French Revolution was famous for erecting an entirely new system of government and social mores on the basis of a declaration of the rights of man and the citizen. Everything changed in France, over a remarkably short period of time, leading to an especially intense debate about what a society founded on equal rights for all ought to look like. This chapter examines two of the systems expounded, derived from the political philosophies of Thomas Paine and Emmanuel Sièyes. The chapter examines the shock with which opponents such as Edmund Burke and Edward Gibbon greeted rights-based politics, and what happened when the new worlds of peace and prosperity promised by Paine and Sièyes descended into chaos and poverty. Around the turn of the eighteenth century the chapter charts a turn away from France and towards Britain as a possible model state for rights compatible with order and with civil liberty; in this turn the history of Scotland, and the existence of brilliant Scottish philosophers played a prominent role, being proof that Britain was not an empire run for the benefit of a mercantile class based in London, but was rather a cosmopolitan empire whose peripheries benefitted as much as the metropole. Republican voices still dedicated to the kinds of transformative natural jurisprudence promised in the early years of the French Revolution, shouted from the sidelines that if Britain was now the model state for humanity, then all of the reform projects of the eighteenth century had altogether failed.

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